Privacy advocates have warned for years about the kinds of surveillance revelations that were aired this week.

Of the two big U.S. government surveillance projects that came to light this week, the one that might seem less startling—the fact that the National Security Agency gathers Verizon’s U.S. call records—troubled privacy activists more than the report that the NSA can get user data such as e-mails and photographs held by Internet companies including Google and Facebook.

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• President Obama Appoints UMBC President as Chair of National Education Commission (baltimore.cbslocal.com)

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• President Obama Appoints UMBC President as Chair of National Education Commission (baltimore.cbslocal.com)

The Baltimore Sun today recognized the 30th anniversary of the Charlestown Retirement Community with a front-page article on founder John C. Erickson and transitions in the retirement housing industry.

UMBC’s Erickson School was founded, in large part, through a generous donation from Erickson. Today, the Erickson School offers a range of programs, from a B.A. and M.A. in the Management of Aging Services (MAgS) to professional and executive education.

In the Sun article, Kevin Heffner, director of external relations for the Erickson School, describes the challenges the senior housing industry faced following the broader housing market crash and credit crisis of the last decade.

Heffner notes that retirees seeking housing today “have higher expectations but a lower ability to pay for them.” He reflects that although Charlestown might need to change its payment model to reflect the shifting market, it should be able to adapt because it offers a broad range of options in housing, meal plans, activities and other amenities

Since the beginning of Treehouse we’ve been focused on making sure that students not only learn, but that they can apply their learning by finding a job in technology. For the past few months we’ve been working individually with students and companies to help them connect and work together, but that process is hard and certainly isn’t scalable. Now, we’ve created a better way to pair Treehouse students with jobs.

We’re excited to announce that we’re launching our Job Board. We’re working with some outstanding initial companies, many of whom already use Treehouse with their employees, to post jobs and pair those available jobs with outstanding Treehouse students. Creating a job listing couldn’t be more simple for companies looking to hire a new designer or developer.

For Treehouse students, scanning the job listings is just as easy. You can filter by categories, by type of position (full time or contract) and by location.

We’re confident that the Job Board is easy to use and relevant, and especially want to thank Daniel Lewis and Kyle Meyer for their hard work on this project. This is just the first step in a series of plans we have relating to jobs, so keep your eyes out for more in the coming months!

Happy job hunting, and thanks for learning at Treehouse!

The post Treehouse Launches Job Board appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

The Great VC Coin Rush: At the Bitcoin Convention
There has been lots of coverage, from us and others, about the potential importance of bitcoins. Even so I enjoyed how this piece got into the culture of bitcoin.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor

We’ve all been taught that it’s important to have daily standup meetings. These are meant to encourage information flow between teams, but the problem is that they’re actually structured to restrict information flow. We’ve come up with a better way at Treehouse and I wanted to share it with you.

Traditional Standup Meetings

The traditional daily standup meeting goes like this:

• The standup meeting is conducted face-to-face (in person or over video chat) and is limited to 15 minutes.
• Each person has 1-2 minutes to express what they did yesterday, what they’re working on today and what’s blocking them from completing important tasks.
• Someone holds a timer and keeps the meeting on schedule. If a discussion breaks out, the person running the meeting asks people to discuss it after the meeting.

As Tommy Morgan explained in his post Daily Meetings are Great but You Should Never Have Them, the whole point of a standup meeting is to exchange information, but asking questions to clarify issues and receive insight are banned. These face-to-face meetings are also very disruptive because you have to stop what you’re doing to attend, whether you’re in the zone or not. Tommy’s proposal is to do daily standup meetings over email instead. I liked his idea but I wanted to take it even further.

A New Way to do Daily Standup Meetings

Email is sub-optimal for this kind of daily standup meeting because of the following reasons:

1. No threaded comments. Long email threads quickly breakdown into reply-hell where it’s difficult to tell who said what and to whom they’re talking.
2. Not searchable or transparent to other teams who might want/need to know what your team is doing. If you weren’t on the email thread, you don’t have access to the data.

I was discussing the idea of email daily standups with Grant Roholt and he had a killer idea: Why not use Convoy, the Treehouse internal Reddit clone, to post daily standup updates?

So here’s how it works:

1. I create a post in Convoy that is titled “YYYY-MM-DD Daily Standup” and email the link to the people in the standup meeting.
2. When they have time, they check their email, click the link and post a comment to the thread with their daily update.
3. Throughout the day the other folks circle back to the thread and ask specific questions to get further insight into what was posted. Threaded comments are natively built into Convoy (Reddit) so it’s super easy to read back through the thread and understand what’s happening.
4. The thread is public to the whole company so anyone can drop in and see what my team is up to, and ask questions if necessary. This matches the “Open Doors” Treehouse Value.
5. All the daily standups go into a category (for example Designer Team Daily Standups) so that anyone can easily go back in time and see what was said/done in previous meetings – an automatic record of what everyone said they’d do so they can be held accountable.

We’re going to build in @replies so that when you mention someone in a comment, they’ll get an email and be reminded to come back to the thread and reply.

How do you do it?

How do you conduct daily standup meetings? What works well and what’s a pain in the ass for you? Looking forward to chatting in the comments!

The post A Better Way to Do Daily Standup Meetings appeared first on Treehouse Blog.